SNP’S strategy of wind turbines to provide our energy needs is blowing in the wind

I felt quite alarmed reading Lesley Riddoch’s article on Scotland’s energy supply (Perspective, 29 May).

A whole page on the subject and yet she did not acknowledge the basic fact that we rely heavily on our two ageing nuclear power stations at Hunterston and Torness.

Those nuclear facilities provide a large part of our electricity when the wind is not blowing and yet there is no provision being made for the loss when they will be decommissioned in a few years’ time. Without that provision there is an electricity supply crisis coming towards us and if we have cut ourselves off from the UK when it hits us, it is hard to see how we can avoid intermittent power supply and blackouts.

Ms Riddoch is a relentless campaigner for independence and so she boasts about SNP success in amassing thousands of wind turbines in Scotland. She seems to think that having even more will solve our energy problems. It will do nothing of the sort.

Already we are in a state of over-supply where wind farm operators are being paid to switch off their turbines when the load becomes excessive.

The problem with wind turbines is not how many we have, but how intermittent they are – surging when the wind blows hard and producing nothing when it dies.

They are not fit for the task of being our main source of electricity. And yet, after ten years of SNP government, there is still no method proposed which could ensure a steady reliable power supply like that given to us by our nuclear facilities for the last 30 years.

At this point SNP acolytes blame all their woes on Westminster. If independence brings us power outages and economic pain, then it must be the fault of Westminster, they say. As if Westminster has a duty to pave the way (indeed, pay the way) for Scottish independence.

The SNP Government has tax-raising powers. It should have levied a Scotland’s Future Energy tax long ago and used the funds to establish new sources of electricity generation, whether tidal, hydro, nuclear or solar.

But that would have required a party of principle and resolve, one which regarded independence as a goal requiring hard work and sacrifice, whereas the current SNP think only of short-term advantage and freebies for gullible voters.

LES REID Morton Street, Edinburgh

Your columnist Lesley Riddoch states in her latest column that Scotland was “particularly hard hit because we supply the bulk of British renewables” when David Cameron ended the subsidies for onshore wind. Would that he had.

Then many of the turbines that litter the Scottish countryside would have stopped turning and been revealed for the white elephants they are: there is hardly a turbine in Scotland that would have been put up in the last ten years were it not for the lucrative subsidy contracts which guarantee at least an extra 100 per cent payment on top of the market price for every kw of electricity generated for 20 years.

All that the cut to subsidies did was to stem the tsunami of rapacious wind speculation. New wind farms were excluded from what had become a licence to profiteer at the expense of consumers. The ever-escalating bill for renewables had become literally unsustainable for government, industry and private citizens.

Like the Scottish Government, Ms Riddoch ignores the fact that Scottish wind turbines are largely funded by electricity consumers outside Scotland. The rest of the UK does not owe Scotland a renewable living; if the Scottish Government wants even more turbines, why doesn’t it pay for them itself?

LINDA HOLT Conservative councillor for East Neuk & Landward, Pittenweem,

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